An Organizational Paradigm
Monday morning, Tess awoke to the sound of voices and heavy thuds.
She watched from an upstairs window as two burly men unloaded forty-two boxes of books from a panel truck and stacked them on the front porch.
As the truck pulled away from the curb, belching smoke from its tailpipe, Tess tried to muster the energy to rise from the window seat on the upstairs landing and face the mountain on the front porch that was, along with the memories of his friends and family, all that remained of Harry Maxwell on this earth.
She longed to surround herself with Harry’s books, steeped in the smell of his pipe and overflowing in the margins with his notes and comments.
At the same time, she dreaded opening even one box, knowing that the books’ presence would be a constant reminder of Harry’s absence.
She considered several means of dealing with her inertia: asking Vivian for a cup of coffee, standing in a hot shower for a half hour or so, even taking a run through campus or out toward Picnic Point on Lake Mendota.
But the voices had other ideas. Before she had stirred from her spot, they began to clamor at her, and while she couldn’t quite make out their words at first, as they spoke over one another, soon enough they gelled into a unison that said, If you don’t organize Harry’s books, something bad will happen to Vivian.
Tess despised the lack of specificity in the voices.
They never indulged in details. How should she organize the books?
By author or title? By height or color or publication date?
And what would happen to Vivian? A car accident or a kidnapping?
A heart attack or a robbery? A little more information would be helpful, she said to the voices.
But the rudeness of the voices extended to their never listening to her, never responding when she asked for clarification.
If you don’t organize Harry’s books, something bad will happen to Vivian.
“Looks like you have a delivery,” said Vivian, discovering Tess in the window seat.
“Harry’s books,” said Tess.
“What will you do with them?”
“Could I have some breakfast?”
“Of course you can, dear.”
There are two parts of OCD, Tess had learned from therapist n ? 8.
There are the obsessions and there are the compulsions.
Obsessions usually take the form of unwanted thoughts or ideas—in Tess’s case, the voices, or the auditory hallucinations as therapist n ? 7 insisted on calling them.
Those obsessions drive the person to perform compulsions—at times for Tess that meant organizing things.
Two days ago, after returning from Marie’s, she had organized a giant pile of old L.L.Bean catalogs by date.
And that was when the voices had been fairly quiet.
The voices that spoke to her as she opened the front door and emerged next to the mountain of her father’s books were louder and more insistent that any she had heard in a long time.
Tess had spent many happy afternoons of her childhood in a beanbag chair that her father deigned to allow in the corner of his study, quietly reading while Harry worked.
After Harry’s death, Marie had forbidden Tess to set foot in that room.
Harry’s will had specified that no headstone be erected for him, so his collection of books had been the only monument left to Horatio Maxwell Jr. Tess hadn’t seen these books up close since she was twelve, but they now formed a wall between her and the world and echoed back the voices of doom.
Even though her logical mind told her not to, when the voices began, she paid attention.
After all, once the voices had been right.
Tess stared at the boxes, not sure how to begin.
She couldn’t just pile them up on the floor of an empty room.
They needed to be carefully arranged on shelves.
She closed her eyes and envisioned the shelves in her father’s study and in his office on campus, trying to count how many bookcases, how many shelves in each case.
Fifty shelves all together? Or sixty? In the long upstairs corridor of Vivian’s house, Tess counted the shelves that lined the north wall.
Eight shelves in each section; eight sections running from the front of the house all the way to Vivian’s bedroom door.
Sixty-four shelves. Probably enough, she thought, and half of those shelves were already empty.
The rest were sparsely populated with old paperback thrillers, figurines of animals, back issues of the New Yorker and Scientific American, and a miscellany of dusty, forgotten objects from glass milk bottles to empty picture frames to a moth-eaten Easter bonnet that looked like it had sat in the same spot since World War II.
“Do you mind if I move some of these things?” Tess asked Vivian.
“Get rid of the lot as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been meaning to clean off those shelves myself for years. Just never got around to it. Do you need any help? I don’t have any Monday classes.”
“I’ll be fine,” lied Tess.
“I’ll be downstairs in my study if you need anything.”
By midday Tess had emptied and dusted the shelves, sweeping their contents into a dozen heavy-duty garbage bags, which she stacked by the street for the next day’s collection.
Every time she carried a bag downstairs, she carried a box of books upstairs.
That still left thirty more boxes to lug up the steps, and by the tenth box she was beginning to resent the high ceilings in the house that meant the staircase felt endlessly long.
The voices never stopped pestering her, but their volume dropped as she worked.
“Are you sure it’s okay to unpack them all?” asked Tess as she and Vivian shared lunch at the kitchen counter.
“Tess, Harry was special to me, too. I’m glad Marie has found someone and is finally moving on.
She’s a woman who takes grief very seriously.
So, I’m happy about David and Florida and all the rest of it.
But I still miss Harry. Walking past his books every day, being able to pick one off the shelf and read it and look at his marginalia—that’s a great gift to me, a wonderful reminder of my old friend. ”
An hour after lunch, Tess had emptied ten of the boxes and arranged the books in alphabetical order by author, leaving plenty of gaps for the rest. She had hoped that beginning this task of ordering would fully quiet the voices, but it did not.
Maybe she hadn’t arranged them the right way.
Maybe they should be in alphabetical order by title.
Or arranged by height. Or color. Or page count.
She could spend the rest of her life arranging and rearranging these books and still not protect Vivian.
As puzzled as she was by the question of organization, she was equally nonplussed by some of the books themselves.
Of course, her father had volumes by every physicist from Newton to Feynman.
Naturally he had biographies of Tesla and Einstein and books about NASA and SETI and books on calculus and astronomy.
It made sense to find works of fiction like Flatland and even His Dark Materials.
But what about The Pantyhose Craft Book?
Why did he have a Harlequin romance called Once Is Not Enough?
What on earth did the great astrophysicist Harry Maxwell need with a book on the history of Lithuanian pastry making? In Lithuanian?
Tess found dozens of books that didn’t seem to belong and considered leaving them out—like bastard points in a scientific experiment.
Surely, she thought, her mother had added these books in by accident or maybe they had been left in the house by visitors.
But for now, she kept them on the shelves, not daring to guess which were Harry’s books and which were intruders.
The strangest book was a copy of Darwin’s The Descent of Man—a one-volume edition from 1874.
Nothing particularly odd about that title in the library of a scientist, even if Harry was an astrophysicist not an evolutionary biologist. But on both the title page and the spine the name Darwin was spelled with a double n.
Darwinn. Tess had looked it up on her phone to be sure she wasn’t remembering it wrong, but there it was on Wikipedia: Charles Darwin.
One n. A typographical error, perhaps? But how bizarre for the same error to be repeated in two places.
Shaking her head, she slipped it onto the shelf between works by e. e. cummings and Humphry Davy.
From the top of the next box, she withdrew a tattered nineteenth-century copy of Beowulf.
Harry had loaned her this very copy to read when she was eleven and school had been canceled due to a blizzard.
He usually only gave Tess books to read in the summertime, when the long days stretched before her like the smooth surface of the lake.
“But Beowulf isn’t for summer,” he had said.
“This is a story for a dark winter day.”
“I like Grendel,” Tess said when she had finished the book.
“Why Grendel?” her father asked.
“Haven’t you ever been to a birthday party where everyone was laughing and having fun and you just wanted to sit quietly and think?”
“Have you?” Marie asked, looking up from her own book.
“Listen to this,” Tess said, turning to a page she had dog-eared.
“‘The troop of nobles knew not sorrow, the wretchedness of men. They knew not aught of misfortune.’ That’s why Grendel attacked them.
I mean, he probably shouldn’t have killed thirty of them, but still, I can understand why he felt upset. ”
Later, Tess snuck out of bed to eavesdrop on her parents.
“What was that all about?” Marie asked. “Should we be worried about Tess? Is she depressed?”
“I think it was the boy who drove into the lake,” Harry said. “She’s been acting more serious ever since that happened.”
“Do you think we should get her some help?”